local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Having to poke through an about: page and find the thing to toggle to turn off this specific AI feature but not that one, and knowing they'd change it on you a couple of releases later, never filled me with confidence.

One switch in a readily discoverable location in the settings menu and it's all gone? Just the job, killed it now on the laptop and the mobile both.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

This is why they're so keen on robots. They want guards whose loyalty they can really count on when the mob shows up with a guillotine.

That one might surrender and meekly accept their likely death at the hands of the machine, I can believe. But all of them? This isn't the first such claim we've heard about AI danger.

I believe that Yudkowsky believes what he says he believes, for example. He says shut them all down worldwide, immediately, and if there are rogue nations who don't go along with it then launch air strikes on their data centres - even against a nuclear state. He said that three years ago. That's the thinking of a man who believes it's genuinely likely that the machines will kill us all in the near future.

And this is still considered extremist lunacy. That tells me the rest of them don't believe what he does.

The general public should care because there's apparently a good chance these machines are going to kill them all, very soon.

They don't care because they don't believe that.

When some AI agent of theirs, trying to meet a developer's benchmark test, eventually hacks the power grid or the water supply to a metropolis to help itself to a way around a sandbox environment, then the general public will care. And when that happens they may well drag AI industry CEOs and researchers out of their beds to the nearest lamp-post.

> approximately eight hundred billion ... oops, that's eight hundred million, of course. Ten percent probability, times the current population of the Earth. The expected consequences of allowing the AI industry to continue their work, according to people who are oddly calm about the prospect.

The actual post is behind a login wall, but I don't see from the BBC article that he's even advocating any action. Is he demanding the immediate shutdown of the data centres? Raids on the labs? Coordinated global action to impound and destroy the equipment? Life imprisonment for anybody found training large neural networks? Rogue researchers declared hostis humani generis? There's no mention of it.

That's what I'd be advocating at the very least. Then the question of whether to take direct action personally on top of that would be one of practicality - can I lay my hands on the right equipment, how can I do the most effective damage, do I have access to high value targets, will it be dramatic enough to frighten new recruits away from joining the industry, will others be inspired to follow my example, should I take the time first to form a team for more extensive action, that kind of thing. It wouldn't be a question of whether it should happen, only one of whether those are the right tactics. Yes, in all probability I'd decide I wasn't personally cut out for terrorism or assassination, but not everybody would decide so. It would be a reasonable choice in the circumstances.

If the expected bodycount from the operation of this industry over the next ten years was approximately eight hundred billion, then that would make AI researchers the single most dangerous group of human beings that has ever existed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, previous title holders for the worst people ever, probably didn't kill even a tenth as many as this man says he expects AI firms to kill in roughly the same timescale. That is the comparison that would frame my thinking about AI researchers and what we should do with them, if I believed what he says he believes.

And I just don't see that kind of thing coming up in these conversations. People calmly and academically discuss their probability estimates as if it's a question of pure theory, not the imminent destruction of all humanity. If they really believed what they say, there would certainly by now be AI Luigis everywhere, data centres would be burning, and people would be quitting the industry all over the world for their own safety. That simply isn't happening. So I don't believe they actually do think that this outcome is likely. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say they don't believe a word of it.

And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.

Someone please bash some sense into Apple.

I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.

... then I would be demanding that every single person involved in the AI industry be rounded up and shot. All of them. My former boss, my coworkers, our competitors, all of them. I would be advocating a world in which is was worse to be found with LLM weights on your computer than to be caught with the worst possible kind of CSAM.

But apparently the idea that his former employer might literally kill literally everybody in just ten years' time isn't that big a deal for this guy. Go into the office one day and take a Second Amendment approach to as many of the frontier research team as possible? No... let's just whine about it on the internet!

Which is why I'm not at all convinced he believes this. If he believed that, this action is too small a response. Nothing short of Butlerian jihadism is an appropriate response, if you actually believe this.

Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.

It's really useful as a spam-sink.

Nebula is actually the one streaming service I ever subscribed to for a while, mostly because I like documentaries and for all I've heard their business model is more in favour of the actual creators.

Dude, what is your problem?

I mention not owning a TV because it's topical - it means I didn't not notice the quality going down slowly over time, so I might notice the difference more than those who did.

Nowhere did I imply that not owning a TV makes me better in any way. It's a personal choice, that's all.

Why you jump on that so aggressively - maybe ask yourself why that is.